


'cause i want you on your knees

by belatrix



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 01:43:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13648830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: Negan runs; Rick follows.(Or, maybe, it's the other way around. Negan's never been quite sure.)





	'cause i want you on your knees

**Author's Note:**

> Yes hello, guess who can't stop thinking about these assholes. (Me. It's me.)
> 
> This was originally meant to be a one-shot, but things got a bit out of hand. The rating is relevant for the next chapters --tags will probably be added accordingly, too.

 

 

 

 

This is how it goes.

Negan packs his things and skips town before the bodies of all the fallen have started going cold on the ground. Or, really, before they’ve started twitching and growling and snapping their teeth at anything with a pulse. Which, _technicalities_.

(More technicalities: he doesn’t actually own anything to pack, not now, not after everything, and it’s an incredibly embarrassing truth but it’s freeing, in a sense, meaning less weight to carry and a marginally easier run. He’s all about appreciating the small things these days, finding comfort where you can, all that tedious self-help drivel.)

And he _hates_ it.

Hates it with every last fucking inch of his insides, hates them all for doing this to him, hates himself for letting them.

Hates himself for being _scared_ of them and making a run for it, and, really, how fucking laughable is he being, it’s not even funny anymore. But a bullet between the eyes is the absolute best he can hope for at the moment, because if they catch him ―and they are so very determined to catch him, it’s actually kind of admirable― they’ll jump him like rabid dogs and tear him apart.

Worst case scenario, they’ll shove him down on his knees and bash his head in with something hard and wooden, just to give their little circle-jerk of revenge some sort of poetic justice, the poor sad fucks. He doesn’t exactly blame them, truly, he’s self-aware like that, but shameful and agonizing death won’t be a very good look on him, he thinks.

The war is over, or so it seems. Thing is, the Sanctuary’s been nearly blown to pieces and the vast majority of Rick’s guys is alive and kicking and there’s probably no one left around who’d happily proclaim loyalty to Negan, so, yeah, he supposes he’s lost.

Very spectacularly so.

What else has he left to do _but_ run?

 

 

 

Being on his own is somewhat strange, for a while.

He’s done this before, he’s not new. Everyone starts from somewhere, after all, and he hasn’t exactly forgotten the day he first opened his window to the decomposing corpses of his neighbors strolling down the street and all over his front yard.

He does remember what running for your life feels like, and it looks like it’s the same now as it was back then. It’s shit.

He drives and then he drives some more, passing through abandoned towns and deserted highways and sprawling fields. He drives until his eyes water and his hands go numb around the steering wheel, until his ears ring with the engine’s roar and the rattle of forgotten change from a hundred lifetimes ago on the console.

He drives until he runs out of gas, at which point he lets out a string of profanities that impresses even himself, leaves the car with the doors open and the keys in the ignition, and starts walking.

This, _this_ ―it used to be a death sentence, back in the early days, wandering about without a group, all by yourself. One man against a small horde of those dead fuckers, it was a guaranteed slaughter fest, no matter how many guns and knives you were lucky enough to be carrying around.

But Negan, he isn’t the same person he was at the start, when entire cities first started crumbling down on themselves ―no matter that sometimes, only sometimes, he wishes he could be, and he doesn’t think about this much, lest it become a bit too real to ignore; the point is, he _isn’t_ the same guy, thank you very much, and a dozen or so walking corpses isn’t nearly as big a threat to him as it once was, and not nearly as much of a threat as another living, breathing person with a gun is capable of being.

There’s the unspoken manual of Survival 101, naturally, composed of the collective experiences of everyone who’s managed to keep existing so far: sticking to roads and highways is fine, but it’s fine as long as you’re quick and quiet enough to avoid walkers when there’s too much space for them to chase you, and it’s fine as long as you got at least one more person to watch your back.

And Negan, well, he doesn’t fucking have _that_ , so.

He sticks mostly to the tree lines, to the spots where he can see but not be seen from; it’s almost surreal, and more than a little disorienting, after having grown so accustomed to striding about with an entourage of at least half a dozen of his Saviors, flanking him like soldiers, guns at the ready, never far from a vehicle with its engine hot and waiting. He could go anywhere, walk into whatever fucking place and make it _his_ , as if there was nothing wrong in the world; Negan supposes he’d gotten a little too used to being the threat, instead of running from one.

But he’s just one guy, now, and it might be awful and it might be vaguely frightening but fuck it, he can do it. He _can_.

He knows his body’s limits, had to figure them out the hard way when he first found himself on the road, when he first got attached to a group, early on when walkers were still things straight out of nightmares and the whole world was nothing but a horror movie on continuous loop.

(That very group ―they died, all of them. Of course.

But then, people had always died, and they’d always keep on dying, and at some point Negan had to make himself stop caring every single fucking time they did.)

He might’ve spend too much time living in relative luxury, all sprawling beds and living rooms and showers and lotions and hair gels, and however many meals a day he felt like having; but it’s easier than it should be, slipping back into this mess of a nomadic life, like an old pair of clothes that you loathe with every fiber of your being but feels too comfortable anyway, too terribly familiar. He remembers how much sleep a body needs before it can be up and running again, how little food someone his size can live on before he starts feeling all faint and withered.

 _Sense fucking memory, ladies and gentlemen_. He laughs a little to himself, and keeps going.

He can’t afford to not keep going.

 

 

 

For a short while he steers clear of cities, large or small ―too big a risk when you don’t have any back-up, but all the food he’d managed to take with ends up gone by the twelfth day.

He has a gun with five bullets inside, strapped to his belt, but he’ll damned if he wastes any of it on trying to shoot down a fucking rabbit or a bird, and he’s not going to start running around hunting furry little creatures, with either Lucille or the single pocket knife he’d found forgotten in the backseat of the car. It’ll look as ridiculous as it’ll be utterly fucking pointless.

And, fine, what if he’s better at killing humans than damn squirrels; it’s the kind of world he lives in.

But he does have to _eat_ , and it takes him the entirety of half an hour to finally decide risking a run into a small town, right off the same road he’s been walking for the past three days.

When he makes his way, cautiously, through the first deserted neighborhood, Lucille in one hand and the gun ready and cold in the other, it feels like something out of a dream. The sun's stitched bright and scalding into the sky, and around him everything looks grey and abandoned and impossibly old, ghost-houses, ghost-roads, eerie as all shit.

(It’s different, now that the only sound’s his own footfalls on the asphalt; he used to do this with his men, hurling jokes and insults back and forth as they cleared through stores and houses, routinely radioing back to the Sanctuary, filling the trucks up, everyone back home before nightfall.

For a single, fractured second, just the space of a breath, he almost wonders if they’re all actually doing better without him. Rick had said ―fucking _promised_ them― that they would.

But, fuck Rick.)

He keeps walking further across the lines of houses, and further, and further. The place as a whole feels fairly intact, if not completely drained of life and color; he even passes by a McDonald’s, its bright sign half fallen off, a strong smell of rot and decomposition wafting off from inside. There’s no hint of growling or hissing coming from any point of the horizon, though, which means no walkers, at the very least ―yet his fingers still stay gripped tight around Lucille, always, always.

(They’d said this to each other, once. The day they got married. _Always_.

Well, fuck that word, too.)

He manages to storm through a total of ten houses and a convenience store around the corner that has, apparently, already been looted twenty times over before Negan finally showed up. He does find a couple of tin cans that are supposed to have beans and potatoes inside, no matter how frighteningly muddy they look; it’s better than nothing.

Anything’s better than nothing.

He ends up spending the night in the first abandoned house he cleared out. Empty, soulless, soundless, no life to be found except for the occasional cockroach flinging itself between Negan’s feet as he makes his way, slowly, up the stairs ―and, except the faces in the pictures lining the walls. A happy, bright-faced family, smiling cheerfully at him from behind framed glass; he keeps his eyes resolutely ahead, doesn’t want to fucking know what they looked like, doesn’t want to think of how they might’ve died, doesn’t, _doesn’t_.

He sleeps in a stranger’s ratty bed under a stranger’s roof, knife secured and within reach just under the dusty pillow, and Lucille―

―Lucille's there, right next to the bed, his fingers curling around her all throughout the night.

“Look at me, baby,” he mutters, staring up into the ceiling, up into nothing. He chuckles, and it sounds half-broken, torn from his throat and reverberating all around the room, echoing off the walls and their peeling wallpaper. “Fuckin’ look at me now.”

 

 

 

Negan thinks about him, because how the hell can he not?

He thinks about how he never got to beat the shit out of Rick about two times a day, and he thinks about how he never got to fuck Rick’s brains out about two times a day, and that’s a grand total of four more times a day than he admits to ever thinking about that asshole (with those ridiculous, blood-sucking blue eyes that somehow drew Negan in, always and without fail, against all of Negan's logic and insticts).

Negan thinks about him. Negan really, truly wants to stop thinking about him.

(For now. Just for now. Just so he can get a couple hours of sleep.)

 

 

 

The thing is ―he will go back there.

There is not a _world_ , not a fucking alternate reality or possible sequence of events, where Negan lets this slide, where he lets himself be kicked down without getting back up, where he doesn’t return for them, for _Rick_.

It might take him a month, five months, a year; he might not be humble and he might not be a damn pessimist, but Negan knows himself, and he knows he can’t do anything yet, not with Lucille and his hunting knife and his meager five bullets. Rick… Rick might’ve been content enough with taking Negan’s life alone, playing the generous messiah and waving a pretty little white flag as long as Negan was good and dead and out of his way, but Negan doesn’t work like that, never fucking has.

He doesn’t ― _can not_ ― let shit like that go unanswered.

Unpunished.

He’ll find guns, and he’ll find ammo, he’ll get himself a damn decent car; fuck it, he’ll find people too, a whole living, kicking bunch of ‘em, merrily charge into their fold like he was never not there, talk them up and into rallying behind him. He’s already done it once, after all. He’ll just have to do it again.

And then, then he’ll come knocking on Rick’s door, guns fucking blazing.

Just ―time, give him _time_.

He’ll go back there.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
